This year’s most outrageous Black Friday fight is probably fake

Black Friday, as any red-blooded American knows, is a time to stay home and finish digesting Thanksgiving dinner—or, depending on your socioeconomic status, to do battle in big-box retail stores over consumer products you didn’t know you needed until right then.

While it’s true that we witness appalling stampedes and brawls year after year on this bleak occasion, 2015’s breakout Black Friday video is almost certainly staged. It purports to show a woman snatching a vegetable steamer from a child, then grappling with the kid’s mother (who is clutching two steamers herself) and yelling, as if the moment is totally scripted, “Why are you being so aggressive! You’re scaring me!”

Here’s why we aren’t buying it:

The YouTube uploader has no credibility. This is the single clip they’ve uploaded to the site—under the handle “BlackFriday Fight,” no less—and they gave it a suspiciously vague caption that also tries too hard to sound authentically amateur: “Im posting anonymous because I don want 2b fired, but I work at this store in saginaw and this lady stole a veggie steamer from a KID on black friday! Shame.”

The woman who steals the steamer is not part of the stampede into the store. She was already inside and waiting. Why? Because she’s a plant. Dead giveaway right there.

The kid never even touches the pile of boxes. He already has his steamer and walks right past the scene of the spill, which is itself an over-the-top distraction so you don’t notice the obvious setup.

The woman snatches the box from the kid instead of picking up one of the boxes lying right there on the floor.

The mom is understandably furious that someone would snatch an item out of her child’s hands, but she already has two of them! Why put a fellow shopper in a headlock after waiting in line all night when you could be running through the store to snatch up other coveted appliances? That’s just bad shopping.

Finally, the women are fighting over a vegetable steamer. This is America. No one would ever fight over a vegetable steamer.

Miles Klee is a novelist and web culture reporter. The former editor of the Daily Dot’s Unclick section, Klee’s essays, satire, and fiction have appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, Vanity Fair, 3:AM, Salon, the Awl, the New York Observer, the Millions, and the Village Voice. He's the author of two odd books of fiction, 'Ivyland' and 'True False.'